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When I arrive at a rehearsal space in South London to meet Sophie Ward, the willowy blonde actress is seated at a table with her back to me. As she turns, she looks so like her late father Simon that I do an involuntary double-take.

She shares his cornflower eyes, his finely carved, intelligent features, his air of agelessness; although 50 years old and with two adult sons, she could pass for a decade and a half younger with her elfin chin and smooth brow.

Sophie says she misses her father, seen here in 'Young Winston' in 1972Credit:
Alamy

Her father died in 2012, aged 70, after a lengthy illness, having enjoyed an acting career that spanned five decades and included Churchill in Richard Attenborough’s epic Young Winston, the Duke of Buckingham in 1970s swashbuckling caper The Three Musketeers (alongside Oliver Reed and Raquel Welsh) and evil Bishop Gardiner in the recent television adaptation The Tudors.

“It sometimes takes me aback just how much I look like dad when I see an old photograph,” says Ward. “I miss him a lot. We all do; we did a couple of small things together but I really wanted us to do a play, which wasn’t to be, not least because there aren’t many suitable father-daughter pieces.

“But my younger son is going to drama school so my wife, Renee, has written a play for us to perform, which will be a lovely acknowledgement of the family trade.”

If you did your own double-take at the word “wife”, then welcome to Ward’s unconventional world.
“It’s slightly easier to explain my relationship to new people since Renee and I got married, because everybody understands what 'wife’ means,” she smiles. “All the same, I do find myself having to negotiate the wide range of responses that the simple fact of our partnership provokes.”

Responses include being recently shouted at in the street (yes, even in enlightened 2015) when a young man yelled “lesbian!” at her. When I suggest next time she calls back, “No thanks, I’ve got one already”, she laughs aloud and promises to do just that.

There’s a still-centred serenity about Ward that lends her a compelling charisma, yet she’s far from a typically aloof beauty.

Although we have met to discuss her new play, an ambitious stage adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, she good-naturedly allows the conversation to be steered towards the personal.

Her elder son, Nathaniel, 26, is a graphic designer and his 22-year-old brother, Joshua, has completed a degree in English and is at drama school. But they were only seven and three when their mother left their father and brought stepmother Renee Brannan, a Korean-American writer, into their lives.

“Bringing up children is mostly common sense,” says Ward. “They need love and security and encouragement and boundaries, none of which is gender-specific.”

Given new research into the fact children from non-traditional families are by no means disadvantaged by being brought up by a same-sex couple, to call Ward a poster girl for alternative parenting might sound flippant but is not entirely untrue.

“I wasn’t being brave 'coming out’, I just didn’t know any other way because I wasn’t prepared to live a secret life,” she says. “I talk about it because it’s important that people out there know there are others who share their life goals and understand their - for want of a less hackneyed word - journey.”

A year before she came out, Ward had appeared in the film adaptation of Joanna Trollope’s A Village Affair, a steamy, if ultimately bleak, tale of lesbian love in the shires.

“By then I had started to feel frozen - that’s the word - by the realisation I was attracted to women,” says Ward. “I became more uptight, more tense and I was unable to express myself. It was a manifestation of unhappiness, I suppose. Being in A Village Affair really spooked me. The whole thing was far too close to home.”

By the time she met Renee, she and her veterinary surgeon husband Paul, whom she’d met at the age of 19, had already discussed her conflicted feelings so it wasn’t a complete shock to him.

“That’s not to say there wasn’t hurt and disappointment, but we were determined to co-parent the boys,” says Ward. “After I met Renee in the US, she moved to the UK and Paul stayed with us at the weekends, which some people found eccentric but it worked for us; we did our best and put the children first.”

Ward continued to live in the Gloucestershire village of Stroud with her newly configured family and was touched by, and appreciative of, their seamless acceptance.

“Everybody was amazing in the village,” she grins. “We had a bit of a kerfuffle with the media, who came and occupied the pub car park for a couple of weeks. We fled to stay with friends and would phone up the pub and ask, 'are they still there?’. The landlord would say, 'Don’t come back yet, we’re doing a roaring trade in sandwiches.’”

Ward, whose sister Kitty is married to comedian Michael McIntyre (“he’s a really funny person, even off-duty”), has tied the proverbial knot with Renee a grand total of three times. They made their first public commitment at The Groucho Club in 2000, which they consider to be “the Big Day”, then had a civil partnership ceremony when it became legal in 2005, followed by marriage after it was legalised in 2014.

Now, after 27 years of country life, Ward and her wife have recently moved back to the corner of North London where she was born.
As a child, Ward’s parents did their best to dissuade her from a career in acting. But she nonetheless started attending classes at the Anna Scher Theatre school, where she was a contemporary of Kathy Bates, Pauline Quirk and Suzanne Tully.

“It was a great experience, full of fascinating people, and although I spoke with an RP accent they let me join in the gang,” she says fondly. “Then, when I was 10 I was cast in a JB Priestley play for television called The Other Window and that was it for me.”

In her teens Ward shot to fame as a model and was hailed by Vogue as one of the faces of the Eighties. She found herself in great demand and on a great many flights: New York, Paris, Milan, India.

“I was earning a lot of money, but oh no, the purist in me was determined to do regional rep for 75 quid a week,” she says rolling her eyes retrospectively at her dewy-eyed conviction. “But that’s what my dad did, so I had to do it too.”

Having missed out on university, she returned to education in her 30s, taking an Open University degree in English and Philosophy, a Masters in creative writing and a further PhD.

Her theatre work at The Citizen’s in Glasgow was very well received. Big screen roles have included Elizabeth Hardy, the true love of Sherlock Holmes in the 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes, while notable television work saw her cast in the acclaimed mini series, A Dark Adapted Eye, alongside Helena Bonham Carter.

Sophie Ward as Isabella and Juliette Binoche as Cathy in the 1992 film version of Wuthering HeightsCredit:
Paramount Pictures

More recently, she played Dr Helen Trent in the long-running ITC drama Heartbeat. Her forthcoming role in A Brave New World is arguably even more life-and-death: she is World Controller “in charge” of Europe. The role was originally written for a man but despite his prescience on many other matters, Huxley failed to anticipate the strides that would be made in the field of equality.

“The play is set 500 years in the future so it’s still some way off, but many of the things that Huxley talks about are very relevant; genetic engineering for example,” observes Ward. “The difference between Huxley and George Orwell was that Orwell thought we would all have to be brow-beaten into embracing the dystopian future and Huxley envisaged we would go towards it willingly.”

She wryly holds up her wrist to reveal a FitBit bracelet that records her daily activities, then nods towards her mobile phone.

“The government hasn’t told me to track my movements, our use of social media wasn’t imposed from above; we’ve surrendered a lot of our privacy voluntarily,” she says. “I’m not saying that matters necessarily, but it is worth examining.”

Quite so. And although the boho flowing black dress, the ethical Toms shoes on her feet - for every First World pair sold, a pair is gifted to a Developing World child in need - and the pair of dolphins tattooed on her forearm clearly signal a non-conformity that rather flies in the face of totalitarianism, a thought occurs to me. If we are eventually obliged to have a World Controller, it would be nice to think it could be a doppelganger every bit as benign as Ward.